'
'No delicacy? No regard for your feelings?--Have I always utterly
misunderstood you? Or has poverty changed you to a woman I can't
recognise?'
He came nearer, and gazed desperately into her face. Not a muscle
of it showed susceptibility to the old influences.
'Do you know, Amy,' he added in a lower voice, 'that if we part
now, we part for ever?'
'I'm afraid that is only too likely.'
She moved aside.
'You mean that you wish it. You are weary of me, and care for
nothing but how to make yourself free.'
'I shall argue no more. I am tired to death of it.'
'Then say nothing, but listen for the last time to my view of the
position we have come to. When I consented to leave you for a
time, to go away and try to work in solitude, I was foolish and
even insincere, both to you and to myself. I knew that I was
undertaking the impossible. It was just putting off the evil day,
that was all--putting off the time when I should have to say
plainly: "I can't live by literature, so I must look out for some
other employment." I shouldn't have been so weak but that I knew
how you would regard such a decision as that.
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